Boaster roasting

[This comes with what is often called a ‘trigger warning’. Despite the tone I always try to adopt in my posts, the issues discussed here are not mere abstractions. People’s past and current suffering can be brought back to the surface by their discussion. Please consider this before continuing.]

Why did they do it?

It’s often said that a society can be judged by how it treats its most disadvantaged members.

It’s equally true that a society can be judged by the conditions it provides for the raising – and socialisation – of children. Adolescence is that moment when the rubber of that socialisation starts to hit the road.

That’s largely because adolescents are good at one thing in particular – seeking out the values of the world they are entering and trying their best to master them. It’s a time for experimentation with those values – a kind of dress rehearsal – to find out how best to emulate and live up to them. In fact, this is what all mammals do as they reach for adulthood.

But how does a society explain to itself what has happened when that process goes horribly wrong?

There’s at least three ways that the ‘bad behaviour’ of children and young people gets explained – or explained away.

The first is to see it as an eternal “age old phenomenon”. ‘Boys will be boys’, ‘Girls will be girls’ and adults, perennially, will, more or less ineffectually, shake their old heads at it all. The solution to the behaviour is that the young people “should just grow up“.

The second is to see it as a personal character flaw, aided and abetted by parents and limited to a dysfunctional few. In this view, bad behaviour is the result of ‘bad apples’ produced by bad parenting.

The third way is to see it as symptomatic – even diagnostic – of deeper pathologies in the social order. In this view, children and young people are the canaries in the best forgotten dark cracks and serpentine passages that writhe beneath a society’s dynamic.

With the emergence into public view of the Roast Busters’ predatory sexual behaviour, the rhetorical stakes surrounding the debate over which explanation to adopt have never been higher.

Not only does the Roast Busters’ behaviour represent a classic case of male on female objectifying exploitation but it also involves peer-to-peer exploitation amongst children and young people and – if all of that wasn’t enough – public boasting about the ‘exploits’.

It’s hard to imagine a brew more toxic with implications for a society – or more revealing of the nature of a society.

Like Hansel and Gretel, let’s start picking up the crumbs dropped by each of those forms of explanation so that we can arrive ‘home’, to where it all began.

There’s actually a long history of rhetoric associated with the first kind of explanation of bad behaviour in youths.

To emphasise that long history, liberally-inclined people often appear to quote Socrates. Over 2,500 years ago, we are told, Socrates bemoaned the fact that:

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

A handy quote for those who try to cut off intergenerational ‘moral panics’ at the pass. But, then again, perhaps it wasn’t Socrates at all, but an extract from Kenneth John Freeman’s1907 student dissertation at Cambridge, in which he remarked:

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …

Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.

Irrespective of its providence, this rhetoric can be motivated by one of two, twin, desires: Either to show that adults have forever been complaining about young people yet the world has kept turning (and, so, conservative adults are over-reacting); or, young people have always had malevolent inclinations that, therefore, need to be tightly controlled by any society worthy of the name.

These Roast Buster boys have been portrayed as a modern, social-media-driven deviant phenomenon and I would have to say this is incorrect.

They are simply the modern manifestation of an age-old phenomenon.

To rank as “age-old” in Tahu Potiki’s world it seems that references to ancient Greece are not needed. So long as it occurred in his own youth then the phenomenon is apparently as old as the hills:

I found myself in situations where underage girls were sneaking in to our dorms with the specific intent of having sex with the teenage boys who resided there.

I was aware of group sexual encounters with seriously intoxicated girls.

I never got personally involved because it ran contrary to what I was comfortable with.

In that most natural of all human settings – a single-sex (boarding school?) dormitory – young people were just doing what they had ‘always’ done. And just so, the argument goes, it continues with Roast Busters. A grand, very human, historically universal ‘tradition’.

It’s also present in the argument that this is a particularly unfortunate outcome of a developmental phase. That’s presumably the thinking behind John Key’s wish that the Roast Buster boys “should just grow up“:

“These young guys should just grow up,” Key said this afternoon.

“I guess, as a parent, I find the issue very disturbing and abhorrent really.

“I mean, you are talking about youngsters who are at a very delicate age. [Presumably he means the young girls here.]”

“These young guys should just grow up,” Key said this afternoon.

Key defended the work of police.

“It is very difficult to progress this issue, if someone isn’t prepared to make a formal complaint.

“And it’s a very challenging situation for a young woman to put herself in that position.”

The problem, of course, is that it’s not clear that growing older necessarily will involve ‘growing up’ in the sense hoped for by Key. But, nevertheless, it represents an intuition that this is simply part of a ‘normal’ process gone awry and, therefore, with any luck it will solve itself in time (at least individual by individual).

The second type of explanation – ‘bad apples from bad parents’ – may accept the historical recurrence of this kind of behaviour occurring amongst youth but it won’t sit back in some sort of semi-relaxed fatalism in the face of such a ‘reality’.

This second explanation attempts, at least discursively, to quarantine the behaviour to the actions of a deviant few who have been bent towards these acts by ineffective or permissive parents.

Potiki’s column can be referred to once again for illustration as it usefully combines the bad apple/bad parent explanation alongside the argument for it being an ‘age-old’ phenomenon:

Teenage boys of a certain character are prepared to unashamedly use sexual violence and exploitation to dominate and shame women.

…

This is where the problem really requires action.

We, as parents, need to smash this perception because if my two boys grow up to become perpetrators who deliberately humiliate and degrade women, simply because they are women, then I [as a parent?] am also culpable.

And, presumably, if ‘we’ “as parents” don’t “smash this perception” then there’s an important sense in which failing to solve the problem is all down to ‘us’. That is, if the ‘smashing of this perception’ is truly within our power, “as parents“, then the fact that the perception remains makes us not just “also culpable” but fundamentally responsible, irrespective of the original causes.

Well, here’s the thing – these young men are 17 and 18-years-old. They’ve been involved in this gang now for two years. My bet is that almost all of them live at home. They’ll be under their parents or a parent’s roof. That’s who I want to hear from now – the parents. That’s who I want the police to get heavy with. Where are their children? How have they developed such atrocious attitudes to women? How can their children be so broken?

… And in all of this, where have mum and dad been? One rape will change a young girl’s life forever. One good parent can change the course of a child’s life too.

Once again, parents become – if not the beginning and the end of concern – the central pivot of blame and site of remedial action by society.

An interesting refinement of this explanation – bad apples and bad parents – is presented by Chris Trotter in a column titled ‘Fathers and Sons’:

The mocking expression on these young men’s faces was also saying: “You’re complicit in this because, deep down, you’re just like us. Deep down, your view of women is no different from ours. They’re meat. You chew them up. You spit them out. And if you can organise a bit of a laugh at their expense along the way – then so much the better!”

How has New Zealand raised such sons?

That’s a question only New Zealand’s fathers can answer.

What sort of example have we set?

“[O]nly New Zealand’s fathers can answer“? According to Trotter, in New Zealand misogyny is passed from father to son as a male heirloom. He doesn’t mention the word ‘patriarchy’ but it is pregnant in the example he uses of how fathers have set their example:

When New Zealand was governed by a woman, did the nation’s fathers indicate to their sons that this was a state of affairs of which they should be proud? Were they outraged on their sons’ behalf when their workmates and drinking buddies stood around the barbecue making jokes about her looks, her voice, her sexuality – or did they join in the ribald laughter?

Paraphrasing Dr Martin Luther King, did they tell their sons that a woman is to be judged not by the shape of her body, but by the content of her character?

In this example, misogyny is tied to the politics of patriarchy (as the denigration of African Americans is tied to the politics of racism) and, so, is inevitably expressed – and mined – in the political sphere itself when a possible threat to patriarchal authority arises.

But, is there nothing beyond parents and fathers that might influence how parents parent and how fathers father?

Is misogyny like a random infection or mutation that, quite accidentally and, so, quite unluckily, has taken root in New Zealand and can only be ripped out of the social fabric through individual parents and fathers ‘upping their game’? Is it otherwise inexplicable?

Or is misogyny something more pervasive and resilient to individual efforts to apply social disinfectant? Is it, perhaps, also supported by processes beyond parents, fathers and the youthful victims and, even, the perpetrators?

Or, in other words, does the third explanation – systemic pathology – have nothing to offer?

For many, the existence of the Roast Busters reveals a widespread “rape culture“:

Associate Professor Nicola Gavey from the University of Auckland said the Roast Busters phenomenon was toxic – and part of a growing international “rape culture”.

“Girls who have been abused by these boys are probably facing every day with courage,” she said.

Also implicated are “many forms of media, including pornography and music lyrics“, from which “young men adopted the attitude that women were “props” for their sexual pleasure“.

And, in an excellent piece by Rebecca Kamm she argues that, despite all the research evidence – especially about ‘acquaintance’ or ‘undetected’ rape – that should expose the myths associated with rape they nevertheless persist, which is a tragedy because “[r]ape myths shape a culture that breeds more rapists; it’s as simple as that.”

So, how can the behaviour of the ‘Roast Busters’ best be explained? Do any of the three explanations work?

I see the explanation in layers.

Layer 1

Is there something about this behaviour that is “age-old“? In an important sense, I think there is. And it goes right back to the particular kind of social beings we are.

There’s an interesting theory of two basic modes of animal social behaviour, first developed by Michael Chance in work on Macacs (a 1998 article in the journal ‘Evolution and Cognition‘ , 4(1), 2-10, by Chance on these modes and their implications for human ethics can be downloaded here).

The agonic mode relies on a strict dominance hierarchy. As a result, the social group has a marked degree of tension within it. Non-dominant members spend a lot of time attending to the dominant individuals, either to avoid them or respond to their ‘commands’. That is, social attention is based on threat and aggression. Baboon troops are classic cases of the dominance of the agonic mode.

Rank is determined by a process of social solicitation not intimidation. Individuals “compete” for the attention of others through display behaviors. These are frequently followed by interpersonal rewards such as grooming, play and mothering behavior or by communal activities such as food sharing.

Humans are capable of both modes, with males being likelier than females to shift to the agonic mode. But the hedonic mode tends to predominate within a group.

In 1972, a Welsh writer, Elaine Morgan, put the basic idea far more simply in ‘The Descent of Woman‘ – her deliberately sarcastic take on what she saw as the male-centric popularised accounts of human evolution put about by Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey:

The hedonic mode favoured by the apes is quite different [from the agonic mode favoured by some monkey species]. Here again, a high place in the ranking order is attained by an outstanding ability to command the attention of one’s fellows. But the apes are more advanced than the monkeys, and they have made a discovery which perhaps more than anything else made possible our own dramatic mental forward leap. They learned that you don’t necessarily have to bite someone in order to make him take notice of you. Among gorillas and chimpanzees this type of physical aggression is extremely rare.

So how do they do it? Primatologists call it ‘display’; to put it in the simplest possible terms, they do it by showing off. They seek for ways of making themselves conspicuous; they bounce around and shake the branches.

(Elaine Morgan, 1985 (revised edition), p. 194)

Whatever else the Roast Busters’ behaviour is about, showing off is surely part of it, and probably a major part. That’s not to say that the agonic mode could not also have been crucial – as Kramm argues, physical coercion can slip and slide around and within more ‘hedonic’ forms of social manipulation.

But, nevertheless, the ‘roasters’ are clearly boasters.

In fact, when young women friends of the group were interviewed they spoke of the boys’ behaviour almost entirely in terms of showing off:

“They are good guys,” said one. “They can make really dumb decisions but they are being teenagers.

“What they are doing is very wrong… they should not have put this on Facebook. They wanted to be famous, they got their fame but in the worst possible way.”

But the girls, who do not wish to be named, claim the bravado we’ve seen from the Roast Busters is just that – even though police believe the group may have exploited a number of drunk, underage victims.

“People know that they are Roast Busters and they go hang out with them and do stuff [… ] but they’re not rapists, they’re cool dudes.“

The behaviour of the young women in the video that accompanied that article also shows another feature of the ‘hedonic mode’ of socialising. They are interviewed not just as a group but with arms over each others shoulders and, at one stage, in a huddle like a sports team. Yet, they each respond to the interviewers questions independently, making their own points.

This from Chance (1998, p. 5):

When danger threatens the hedonic group, it responds in a completely different manner to that of agonic troops. It gathers: “together as a group, making body contact, slapping and hugging each other, from which activity each member gathers confidence to attach the predator on its own. The group is not the source of common defense as in the agonic mode, but a source of mutual confidence from which the individual makes individual assaults”.

[Australian researcher Richard Eckersley has written this very interesting article on the contradictory strategies used by young people to gain some sense of efficacy in today’s world – ‘Separate Selves, Tribal Ties, and Other Stories‘]

Three close friends of the Roast Busters sex gang say the group’s ringleaders exaggerated many of their sexual exploits to impress their classmates

…

They told Fairfax those in the group made up many of their claims about sex with drunk girls

…

The Roast Busters associates … said much of what was posted on social media was “a joke”.

“I hang out with them and go to parties with them,” one friend said. “They’re good people, one on one. It’s all a persona, a front, like ‘we’re bad, we get with girls’.

“None of us thought it would come this far. At the start it was a joke between the bros. It wasn’t a big deal but then those two made choices and they have to deal with it. I think making a Facebook page and publicising [the Roast Busters] was the stupidest thing they could have done.”

Human males – like the gorillas and chimpanzees who beat their chests – boast and play to an attention-prone audience. As Morgan (1985, p. 196) tellingly describes the tendency:

whereas the young ape, competing for attention with other young apes, is daily stimulated to search for something new by the troop’s constant unspoken challenge: ‘Etonne-moi!‘

In many ways, this is the hope of humanity – that we are not all agonism, violence and threat. Yet the hedonic mode, with all its promise of cooperative, caring, creative and intricate interactions and relationships still needs the right social conditions to bear its best fruits.

In the wrong conditions it can, far too easily, form an unholy alliance with the agonic mode – characterised by exploitation and objectification of others who become reduced to the ciphers of a dominant threat to be obeyed or a subordinate opportunity for exploitation.

A society can be judged by how it uses this biological endowment.

Which brings us to the second layer.

Layer 2

How a society is structured directly impacts how we interact. If civilisations have been characterised by any particular form it is the form of a hierarchy. Whether monarchy, oligarchy or patriarchy, the point of any hierarchy is to create an unequal distribution of power – in other words, it creates dominance hierarchies.

It is no coincidence that, by contrast, it was in a quite different social structure – the egalitarian and, hence, necessarily democratic social groups of early hunter-gatherers – that our hedonic mode of interaction arose. Within the group, it was your performances (and ability to entertain!) that gained you what attention and status could be mustered. Human capacities for creativity, oratory, elegance, storytelling, innovation and humour no doubt flourished in this setting.

By contrast, and in the terms just used, hierarchies inevitably encourage the far more unimaginative and socially dampening agonic mode of social relations.

New Zealand, like most modern states, has been, right from its colonial origins, patriarchal in form and values. The quintessential Kiwi for most of its short history has been the male pioneer/farmer. Women gained the vote in 1893 but it took more than 100 years for the country to have its first female Prime Minister.

Other hierarchies were also entrenched: Pakeha over Maori; boss over worker; heterosexual over homosexual; the wealthy over the poor.

In the lacerating briers of these hierarchical arrangements it’s always going to be hard to raise young people who are respectful of others and empathic to their suffering. It would always be hard in that environment to contain, let alone eliminate, the kind of misogyny that we now find – at least publicly – abhorrent. Departures from the patriarchal norm would have been met with harsh treatment, as hierarchies encourage.

There’s one very revealing example of how hierarchies can persist and dominate – and distort outcomes – despite the capacity of humans (male and female) to operate in the hedonic mode: leadership.

There’s a lot of concern, here in New Zealand and globally, over the continuing under-representation of women in boardrooms and government. As this opinion piece by the amazingly named British psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in the Huffington Post noted, there’s any number of explanations as to why this is. But there’s also a non-obvious one that, when pointed out, starts to seem all too obvious.

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women.

In short, our ‘unspoken challenge’ of ‘Etonne-moi!‘ is taken up – disproportionately – by men with various displays of (over)confidence and hubris; so we reward them with leadership.

The idea has a neat and intuitively interesting appeal. The opinion piece goes on to say that,

The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that they that are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent — the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams, and to inspire followers to set aside their selfish agendas in order to work for the common interest of the group. Indeed, whether in sports, politics or business, the best leaders are usually humble — and whether through nature or nurture, humility is a much more common feature in women than men.

[The links in the quotes are well worth a read. The questions it raises about leadership may be the stuff for another post!]

Data on thousands of managers from 40 countries shows that “men are consistently more arrogant, manipulative and risk-prone than women” and that,

the mythical image of a “leader” embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism (Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin), psychopathy (fill in the name of your favorite despot here), histrionic (Richard Branson or Steve Ballmer) or Machiavellian (nearly any federal-level politician) personalities.

Interestingly, narcissism in young people (well, in the United States at least) may well have been on the rise in recent decades. But, even for those sceptical of the claim make the point that, irrespective of actual narcissism, today’s world may well be ‘narcissist-friendly‘.

Which brings us to the final layer – social hierarchies have been with us for a long time; they are not the last word.

We have all the resources in the world at our disposal. Let an intelligent, empathic society be our model. Accept nothing less: not from our broadcasters, prime minister, police force, friends, family or colleagues. Demand re-education – do it yourself wherever and whenever possible, even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially if it’s uncomfortable. Rewrite social narratives.

Think about those three phrases and then think about today’s New Zealand. Ask yourself why present day New Zealand may now need to let an “empathic society be our model“? Ask yourself what our current ‘social narrative’ might be and why does it need to be rewritten? And, finally, ask yourself just what it is that makes doing something feel “uncomfortable“?

The last layer is the revolution – political, economic, ideological, technological – that the last 30 years have wrought in New Zealand society. We can call it neoliberalism, for short – and it comes with its own set of values.

And, even in the ‘full set’ of values, empathy no longer gets official recognition.

Here are two of the more revealing studies of ‘modern’ attitudes. The first is reported by Jean Twenge in an article titled ‘Are we justifying cheating?‘ and concerns a study of attitudes towards cheating.

I wish this were an isolated example [A news report featuring comments ‘explaining away’ cheating by students on college entrance exams]. Apparently, it’s not, according to a large and in-depth study done by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and reported in his new book, Lost in Transition. Smith and his colleagues report widespread moral relativism, and what they call “moral individualism,” among Americans age 18 to 23.

You may have heard of ‘moral relativism’, but ‘moral individualism’? Here are some of the question and answer sessions from the study that Twenge reports and Twenge’s conclusion:

Q: Is it okay to break moral rules if it works to your advantage and you can get away with it? A: Break moral rules? I’m sorry, what do you mean by moral rules? I would have to say in some cases, yeah, it would be okay. It just, it would really depend what those rules were. It’s on a case-by-case basis.

Q: What about helping people in general? Are we as a society obligated to do something? A: I really don’t think there’re any good reasons, nope, nothing. Q: What if someone just wasn’t interested in helping others? Would that be a problem or not? A: No, I don’t see why that would be a problem. Q: And why is that? A: Because I mean is that really our duty, to help others? Is that what we’re here for? I mean, they can help themselves. … Q: So if someone asks for help, we don’t have an obligation to them? A: Yeah, it’s up to each individual, of course.

The end result: Everything is up to the individual. If things are competitive, and it will help me get ahead, why not cheat? There are no rules, and who cares about how it affects anyone else?

The study asks, “Does adherence to the neoliberal values that underpin our economic and academic systems predict acceptance of cheating?”

The answer?

Four studies revealed that adherence to neoliberal values of self-enhancement—power and achievement—predicts the motivation to gain social approval; this motivation, in turn, favors the adoption of context-specific competitive performance-approach goals, which predict the condoning of cheating.

The conclusion?

Most important, a classroom-based study addressed the core question of cheating behavior, revealing that adherence to self-enhancement values indeed predicted actual cheating behavior. These results point to the relevance of diagnosing societal values as social causes of cheating.

Neoliberalism ramps up – massively amplifies – the need to boast, to ‘perform’ (in the sense of a ‘performance’). In the process, any moral responsibility to others risks being left by the wayside.

Worse. Others become mere objects, props for the performance.

I’ve come a long way from the first layer – our evolved sociality. The story didn’t have to end like this. But it has.

Our society is fertile ground for the worst to flower: Some boys brutally abusing young girls and then publicly humiliating them for all their ‘admirers’ to see.

Narcissism clearly leads to more social media use, social media use leads to positive self-views, and people who need a self-esteem boost turn to social media. It is less clear whether social media directly causes narcissism, at least in the short term. With narcissists having more friends and posting more frequently, however, social media sites are clearly influenced by those high in narcissism at a rate higher than their fair share.

I’d definitely recommend having a bit of a read of some of the links and following up on some of the research. I found them very interesting and they help you start to look at the things people do in new ways.

What I like about the notion of empathy isn’t just that it is some nice thing that some people do (though it definitely is that), but that it’s part and parcel of some of our more remarkable capacities and abilities as humans.

Thanks for the comment – and the congratulations – minette. Much appreciated.

Like everyone else, I struggle to understand this world of ours. It has such possibility and such advantages yet, as you say, there are new ills (or virulent versions of old ones).

It’s a bit like the so-called ‘non-communicable diseases’ (heart disease, cancers, obesity, diabetes, etc.). We’ve ridded ourselves, more or less, of infectious diseases but then made ourselves a whole new batch.

Ah yes, Christchurch on Cup Day. The challenges I recall relate to navigating Wrights Road by bike. Cars and drunk people all moving in different directions, though fortunately at about the same speed, and slower than me on my bike

To be honest, I think I’ve not understood what you mean by “challenges”. I find it difficult to reconcile the word I grew up in with the world they are growing up in, in terms of what they should expect, or, more concisely, how best to demand it so they get it. Fingers crossed I can work it out before it’s too late.

The ‘Cup Day challenges’ reference was tongue0in-cheek and referred to members of a young person’s peer group – I was thinking ahead to when my daughter became their age.

I live in a rental area reasonably close (walking distance) to the raceway – by midday, young groups from neighbouring houses were making their intoxicated way to the raceway pushing over rubbish bins as they went (our day for recycling bin pick-ups). We’ve had – in the last three weeks – parties, fireworks most nights (often in the early hours) and cars doing doughnuts at 1:00am outside our place.

As I say, a bit tongue-in-cheek as I’m not particularly interested in ‘youth of today’ complaints that lack deeper analysis.

They’re presumably responding to the world’s opaque challenges rather than being the challenges themselves.

As for being ‘qualified’, well I guess there’s chalk-face qualifications and coal-face qualifications. Raising children and young people makes it pretty clear that not everything about this world supports the process.

Here’s the really weird thing PG. When thinking about this topic I really have no sense of where all this deep, endemic misogyny comes from. Surely rape is a stupidly counterproductive crime? I mean while I must emphasis it’s utterly unwanted by the victim … I can’t for the life of me see what’s in it for the perpetrator either. In among the layers you so deftly explore I wonder if there is a place for this admittedly odd, perspective.

Everyone says that rape is not about desire, but about anger and power. Fair enough .. by why so angry and why so powerless? Why so predatory?

The one fundamental constant about the power balance between the genders is that in the normal course of events it is the female who holds the vote … she gets to choose when and with who she will have sex. Not only will she mostly likely NOT have sex when she doesn’t … but she almost certainly WILL when she does.

Males by contrast do not have this experience. For us it’s mostly a case of always having to ‘earn’ the opportunity to have sex. For males it’s never a given that you will ‘get lucky’ no matter how much you are choosing to.

OK so while this is a statement of the blindlingly obvious in one sense .. but on slightly deeper examination .. is this not one of the well-springs misogyny? Just flat out resentment at the relentless asymmetry of this arrangement?

(And before anyone leaps on this as yet another form of ‘victim blaming’ … I’m really, really not intending that at all. I’m not trying to justify anything … I’m trying to understand.)

Research in the last few decades amply confirms that both genders have very similar level of interest in sex … the main difference is that women usually layer it with many more emotional and social considerations than do most men. And it is of course why women experience rape (which is simply the coercive removal of this power of choice) so much more intensely than most men. And it’s why rape is ultimately such a very gendered crime.

And at the same time it also explains the immense empathy gap; because so many men never really experience any authentic sexual sovereignty for themselves … they utterly fail to grasp how it is so valued by women.

I’m not at all sure that women are as much in control of whether they will have sex and with whom as you assume. There are many complex layers to the questions of choice and consent. I think that in very early forms of human society women did largely control the relations of reproduction – but patriarchy destroyed much of that control – made woman’s choice subordinate to that of the dominant males in her life and took away her right to consent.

I think what you say is probably doubly true for adolescent women. As savvy as we might like to think our choices are when we’re that young we’re still learning what life’s subtle (and not so subtle) influences on us are and, in most cases, we definitely haven’t got our intellectual defences (and courage!) up and ready for what the the world throws at us.

First, I don’t think that the exercise of power over someone else necessarily means that there is a ‘lack of power’ or ‘powerlessness’ that is motivating it. That’s why I’m generally opposed to any concentration of power (in an ‘elite’, in the ‘1%’ or in one gender) and don’t explain its use as resulting from a ‘power imbalance’ in which the wealthy are at a logical disadvantage. Once power is there you can bet your bottom dollar someone will use it just because they have that power.

I suppose you could adopt an ‘egoism’ theory of motivation and claim that we all seek various forms of power to overcome our inherent sense of ‘inferiority’ (as Alfred Adler famously theorised). But that’s a long way from the claim that powerful people experience (psychologically or socially) a sense of ‘powerlessness’. And that brings me to my second point.

I think it’s important to be clear about an ‘imbalance’ in what I would call ‘biological logic’ (or ‘evolutionary logic’), on the one hand, and the ‘imbalance’ that might be socially, cognitively and emotionally experienced by actual ‘persons’, on the other.

You’re right that standard evolutionary analyses argue that, in general, females in sexually reproducing species – especially mammals – are the ‘choosers’ and that males need to perform’ in order to be ‘chosen’. That’s why mammals often have such complicated ‘courtship rituals’ as the ethologists used to call them (in a previous life I studied ducks and you don’t get much more complicated ‘courtship’ displays than that).

But, it’s perfectly possible that the ‘choosiness’ (i.e., sexual selection processes) that, in evolutionary logic, females ‘experience’ (metaphorically) can be said to ‘favour’ females while, at the same time, actual ‘female persons’ – women – can have no experience of such power or of being ‘favoured’ in their experience of life today.

Importantly, it also doesn’t mean that – in particular settings or social conditions – (some) men might actually become the ‘choosers’ and that women become the ‘performers’, vying for male ‘favours’. The use that a particular social and cultural environment makes of the biological and evolutionary starting ingredients is absolutely crucial.

In fact, it could be argued that patriarchy has been an extraordinarily powerful set of structures that arose to nullify, counter, exploit or even invert – through physical and socially coercive means – that original biological ‘imbalance’.

You and me and everyone else are persons – and that’s not given by biology because, as I and others would argue, persons are ‘socio-cultural artefacts’ rather than biological phenomena. There’s no ‘John’ or ‘Jane’ in biology. In evolutionary terms, women may be the ‘choosers’ but in any particular society or culture ‘Jane’ may have no choice.

Of course it’s true that a particular man – imagine a kind of Woody Allen character who is terminally inept in the eyes of all women – may very well have a personal experience of little ‘power’ in his efforts to gain the attention and ‘favours’ of women (or at least of particular women he desires). But, surely, that’s not the issue – certainly not with the ‘cool dudes’ who comprise the Roast Busters group.

I think the Roast Busters give us a much clearer insight into the structural relationships of power between the genders within our society than does the Woody Allen-type character who, perhaps, is ‘self-handicapped’ from using that structural power by something we might call ‘character’ or a ‘conscience’ – though, for the comic effect, Allen tends to play him as a very dedicated but utterly hopeless ‘Casanova’.

In the terms I used in this post, I think the socially pervasive ‘imbalance’ that favours men (in general) comes about from the particular mix of the agonic and hedonic social modes that a hierarchical and, most relevantly, a patriarchal social structure encourages.

You ask ‘what’s in it for the rapist’? No doubt the answer varies from case to case but, if we focus on the Roast Busters and ask what’s in it for them I think the answer is obvious.

They get the attention of others – the girls who defended them and the boys who try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to become ‘cool dudes’ too. And they achieve those ‘hedonic mode’ rewards through partly agonic means (from plying girls with alcohol to actual physical restraint).

More generally, our society is incredibly rewarding of men who boast about their conquests, who wryly smile while referring to a woman mutually known by their mates. Some of these men will be ‘undetected rapists’.

They get their ‘hedonic mode’ rewards as well, courtesy of the prevailing patriarchal values and attitudes. Which, I would add, have been amplified in the last 30 years or so because of their overlap with neoliberal values.

thanks heaps for this PG.
pffff. As Trisa points out, some great observations and explanations of how we came to find ourselves here.

A bit of an aside, but I must say I laughed in recognition at the bit about how we mistake (over) confidence for competence and how competence is actually quite humble and not the slightest bit over confident. (The best leaders I’ve had recognised that they didn’t and couldn’t know it all, and their competence came from an ability to recognise the competencies of the people around them – something along the lines that it takes one to know one, I guess!). Sadly, though, the tendency to mistake confidence for competence doesn’t bode that well for democracy and it explains how idiots quite often get to run corporations and countries!
Sadly also, It probably means that the roast “boasters” could end up in leadership positions in the future once this has all blown over and people have forgotten them.

I definitely reckon there’s another post in that. Look forward to it, in fact.

Thanks for taking the time to comment and, yes, that point about leadership makes a lot of sense – intuitively, from experience and in relation to some of the research I’m familiar with. I’ll have a good think about how that could be applied to some of our leaders in New Zealand 🙂